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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Returns
Remind
Combination
Return
Best
Always
Observes
Variance

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I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
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People focus on role models it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up
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Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
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Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
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They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns) in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.
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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
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It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem to this day I avoid the label Lebanese, preferring the less restrictive Levantine designation.
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Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
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